Why every business blog needs fraud protection (not just e-commerce sites)

Whether you run a business blog or an e-commerce site, it contains sensitive information, making it a lucrative target for cybercriminals. Even your smallest vulnerability can entice them to target your platform with DDoS attacks, refund fraud, and other malicious practices that may damage your business.

So it’s difficult to deny the importance of fraud protection – a complex of practices that safeguards your business against malicious attacks. But where to start?  

Keep reading to explore the most common website fraud types and learn protection strategies to fortify your business against online threats. 

Four Risks of Poor Fraud Protection

Biggest Website Fraud Threats Exposed

Let’s dissect the most common fraud types and explore how they can harm your website.

Duplicate Leads

If you’re leveraging affiliate marketing to generate leads, you should be on the lookout for duplicate leads.

Although duplicate leads may seem legitimate at first, in fact, they’ve already been acquired by other advertisers, which means that it’s unlikely that they’ll continue their customer journey with you.

If your business relies on calls, criminals may also attempt to sell duplicate callers. The easiest way to prevent that is to deploy dynamic call tracking, a technology that helps you stay on top of caller sources to flag fraud easily.

Important: Duplicate leads may end up in your system by accident, so you may not want to terminate partnerships unless the issue is properly investigated.

Click Fraud

To expand on affiliate marketing, cost-per-click programs are also at risk. Unscrupulous affiliates use IP fraud to inflate their click numbers and earn excessive commissions. More so, if you’re paying more for traffic from specific locations, bad actors may also abuse that, spamming IPs from high-ticket GEOs. 

The primary methods of performing this type of IP fraud include:

• Click farms: People incentivized to click links with money or other items of value
• Bots: Scripts: that change IPs and mimic human behavior to simulate legitimate clicks

DDoS Attacks

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to take down your website, often with the end goal of injecting malware or breaching your data. 

Regardless of the goal, DDoS attacks inevitably:

• Deter your audience: Users can’t access your website for an extended period, creating an opportunity for competitors to capture your traffic and leads.
• Halt revenue generation: While your website is down, you can’t sell your products, which halts revenue.
• Drains your budget: If you lack internal IT staff, you must hire professionals for system repair, which can be very costly if the damage is severe.

From the technical standpoint, DDoS attacks fall under the umbrella of IP fraud. Bad actors use IP spoofing to generate attack traffic and overwhelm your domain until it’s down. 

Social Engineering

Blogs and e-commerce sites serve as prime targets for social engineering or phishing attacks, which can take two forms:

• Fraudsters impersonate your customer service representatives, reach your clients, and steal their personal data, such as payment or account credentials.
• Fraudsters impersonate your employees, possibly hijacking their IPs to bypass security protocols, to get their hands on your data or money.

Refund Fraud

If your website sells and offers a refund policy, it becomes a potential target for refund fraud.

Here’s refund fraud in steps:

1. 1. Vulnerability identification: Criminals scan your refund policy for vulnerable rules, such as allowing refunds before a product is shipped back and inspected.
   2. Contact merchant: Criminals purchase an item, contact your representative, and make a false claim, such as “I received an empty box” or “Activation key is not valid.”

• Receive refund: The sales representative, likely trained to prioritize customer satisfaction and resolve issues quickly, refunds the product price.

As a result, criminals are left with money and items they can later resell to multiply their profits further.

How To Protect Your Website From Fraud

Consolidate Lead and Caller Data

To strengthen security in the affiliate marketing sector, you may want to consolidate your data in one place with lead distribution software, which is a core part of LMS.

Advanced lead distribution software integrates into your tech stack, automatically pulling your accounting, IP fraud, and other data. Such software often includes built-in, configurable fraud and bot traffic detection, which significantly streamlines security processes for businesses with high traffic volumes.

To teach your employees to detect and address fraud in lead distribution software, use training modules such as KnowBe4’s. They simulate the infiltration of fraudulent traffic, teaching your affiliate managers to be proactive and prevent business harm.

Incorporate IP Scoring

Given that DDoS attacks, phishing, fake traffic, and other schemes involve IP fraud, assessing IP addresses becomes a necessity rather than a choice. Luckily, specialized tools can deliver historical data on almost any IP address. 

For example, the IP fraud score tool can help you assess users’ backgrounds, flagging fraudulent leads before they enter your system and cause damage. You can also use this tool to screen for repeat registrants — users suspected of sign-up fraud.

Manual IP scoring can help you better distinguish IP fraud from legitimate traffic:

1. Set up your scoring model: Select the scale’s range, scoring factors, and decision thresholds, such as 0 – 10 for low risk and 80 – 100 for high risk.
2. Screen IPs: Collect IP fraud data using IP lookup services to gather and score users’ data.
3. Execute the decision: Let users pass into your platform, assign them additional checks, or block them.

Leverage AI Fraud Prevention Tools

Besides being a game-changer in content marketing, AI is also very useful for security – specifically, fraud prevention. Adaptive learning is the key. It enables smart machines to tailor their models to emerging fraud patterns, giving you an edge over new fraudster tricks.

Let’s explore some of the most popular AI fraud detection tools for your website: 

• Kount: Consolidates solutions against payment and identity fraud, and simplifies compliance.
• Sift: Uses machine learning to flag fraud across your customer journey, from website sign-ups to purchases.
• Signifyd: Focuses on protecting businesses from chargebacks, ensuring that every purchase on your website is legitimate.
• MaxMind: Identifies IP address fraud by checking users’ locations and behavioral patterns.

Whenever choosing an AI solution for your business, ensure it seamlessly integrates with your current infrastructure via APIs for maximum convenience. 

Encrypt Your Data

Both e-commerce sites and business blogs contain a lot of discreet information. In the case of a hacker attack, the former risks exposing users’ sensitive data, while the latter risks jeopardizing data integrity and harming SEO.

To prevent data corruption and cloud leaks, you may want to encrypt your website, which you should do in three layers.

Authenticate Emails

A common vector for initiating a social engineering attack is email spoofing – the practice of impersonating your brand in email. 

These protocols help you prevent email spoofing:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF): Blocks emails sent on behalf of your brand from unauthorized IP addresses.
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): Attaches digital signatures to your emails to verify authenticity.
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC): Tells servers whether to send emails to spam or block them if they fail SPF and DKIM checks.

Monitor Your Brand

Unfortunately, email authentication alone doesn’t constitute comprehensive phishing protection. You also want to monitor the web for imposter domain names (specialized tools may help you with this) and for applications or pages that use your logo without permission.

Whenever you or your team finds a platform that you believe uses your brand for phishing, contact the hosting provider, domain registrar, or social media platform to request a takedown.

Conclusion

As you can see, many anti-fraud practices secure your website against malicious attacks. Does that mean that you should implement them all? Not necessarily. You want to assess risks and implement solutions only where you’re vulnerable – otherwise, you may end up investing time and money into impractical solutions.